Thoughts on Excellence

Friday, August 16, 2013

Slowly Sliding to Mediocrity or Worse

First Nations vs. Canadian Military at the 1990 Oka Crisis

The Oka Crisis and other events prompted Canada's Federal Government to re-consider its policies towards the First Nations' people. A Royal Commission on Canada's Aboriginals was formed in 1991, which outlined many serious problems in their 4,000 page report of 1996, and the recommended solutions.

One Federal Department that the Royal Commission found negligent was Health Canada. Health Canada agreed with the findings of the Royal Commission, and was told to fix it.

To find out how well Health Canada had responded to the problems identified by the Royal Commission, Canada's Auditor General ("AG") did an audit on Health Canada in 1997. The AG was disappointed by the lack of effort and results that Health Canada had achieved in the year after the Royal Commission's report. The AG made many recommendations to help Health Canada to get back on track and make progress on the problems identified by the Royal Commission.

The AG gave Health Canada another 3 years to get these 1997 AG recommendations completed, then did a follow-up audit on Health Canada in Year 2000.

It's good to see that the AG does followup. Too often, there is a 15
minute flash of infamy to an AG report or other negative story, then the government, the press, and the public are distracted to something else, and things quickly go back to "business
as usual", with no significant change having occurred. Followup and
historic memory within organizations (or their watchdogs) is a sign of both
excellence and effectiveness.

More recently, 2012
academic research paper has been written about the ongoing abuse of the
prescription drug plan for First Nations people, and its continuation for the last 16 years, still the same or similar to the 1996 Royal Commission finding.

It seems that Health Canada moves significantly slower than a glacier. In spite of the many caring people who work at Health Canada, perhaps they are close to being a truly fossilized bureaucracy.

I assume that the government's intent behind the providing of prescription drugs to First Nation people is to help them.

Providing excessive amounts of psychotropic drugs (eg. opiates such as Oxycodone, Percosetand other addictive narcotics) to anybody is clearly
not helping. Why government would enable and encourage addiction and illegal
trafficking in narcotics by providing these drugs for free and without adequate
controls to prevent abuse is hard to explain. Could Health Canada not see this
coming? Did they not think about unintended consequences from their
plans, or were these risks known and too easily dismissed?

Knowing that most First Nations communities have significantly lower income
and standard of living as compared to main stream society, then dropping
huge quantities of addictive, free, high value prescription drugs into these impoverished
communities seems like gross negligence, or worse.

The overall result is the government forcibly takes money away from taxpayers so that
the government can use it to create bigger, more expensive problems (eg.
chronic addictions, trafficking, illegal activities, social and familial
dysfunction, etc.) in First Nation communities. The government needs a new program to fix the unintended consequences from the previous program. Talk about a make-work project!

While Health Canada has made some small improvements over the last 1.5
decades, they would seem to have been distracted or working half-hearted to
take 16 years, and still haven't fully addressed the Royal Commissions recommendations, nor the AG's recommendations.

Unfortunately, it isn't just Health Canada who fails to change their mediocre ways.

Over the last 35 years of my career, I have seen too many other
organizations fall into the same trap as Health Canada and the AG. Everybody has problems. However, it is the response to those problems that separates the excellent from the mediocre.

I have seen that problems were identified, but people then stepped over those problems every
day, or swept them under the carpet so they could be out of sight and out of
mind. Management usually allowed this corporate blindness to occur, and
continue. Neither the workers nor management wanted to address these
messy problems, so they didn't. After 20 years of this behaviour, you
have an organizational swamp filled with unresolved problems that taints the drinking water of
everybody downstream.

What is the solution? How do we avoid this natural human frailty?

You
hire and enable an Auditor General for your organization. Somebody who is
outside of the normal channels who is paid to hire excellent auditors to help
identify the polluted swamps, encouraging you to drain them, find the rotting
festering problems, and get them taken care of in a timely and effective
manner. If your organization isn't fortunate enough to have an AG today,
pick up the phone now and call somebody to get the help you need.

Allowing 3 years to elapse between follow-up audits, as demonstrated by AG and Health Canada, isn't effective either. Organizations often need help in getting started and keeping it going. That's where a good facilitator comes in. Both Health Canada and the Auditor General can learn from this tragedy for Canada's First Nations people. You can learn from their mistakes too.

If you don’t call somebody for help right now, but wait another 15 minutes, the pangs
of guilt about the festering swamp in your organization will soon pass. Call now, operators are standing by to receive your call.

If you choose not to call, you may already be on a slow slide towards mediocrity or worse.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

What Golf has taught me about Excellence

I've been playing golf on and off for nearly five decades. I
stopped playing several years ago because I'm far from the player I wish I
were. But this past year I've taken the opportunity, for the first time in many
years, to play golf nearly every week. My game has slowly gotten stronger. I've
had a number of heady moments during which I've almost played like the player I
long to be.

And almost certainly could be, even though I'm 67 years old. Until recently, I
never believed that was possible. For most of my adult life, I've accepted the
incredibly durable myth that some people are born with special talents and
gifts, and that the potential to truly excel in any given pursuit is largely
determined by our genetic inheritance.

Anders Ericsson, arguably the world's leading researcher into high performance
has been making the case that it's not inherited talent which determines how
good we become at something, but rather how hard we're willing to work --
something he calls "deliberate practice." Numerous researchers now
agree that 10,000 hours of such practice is the minimum necessary to achieve
expertise in any complex domain.

That notion is wonderfully empowering. It suggests we have remarkable capacity
to influence our own outcomes. But that's also daunting. One of Ericsson's
central findings is that practice is not only the most important ingredient in
achieving excellence, but also the most difficult and the least intrinsically
enjoyable.

If you want to be really good at something, it's going to involve relentlessly
pushing past your comfort zone, as well as frustration, struggle, setbacks and
failures. That's true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even
maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at
something you've earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.

So
how do you achieve excellence in an organization?

We have found
that a structured approach to implementing change and continuous improvement
into an organization are the keys to achieving business excellence. The goal of
the Business Excellence Program is to improve the customer's loyalty to your organization.

You can't achieve true, life-long loyalty if you are continuously breaking commitments, delivering less than perfect quality, or having mis-communications. You have to be trustworthy.

Through that improvement process, most organizations find that their net profits go up as well. You might get so good that you can justify premium pricing over your competitor's offerings.

All of this starts by focusing attention on the strategic issues & bottlenecks in
all aspects of the company’s operations - financial, customer, process, and
human resources

There are 5
major elements to a Business Excellence Program:I’ll cover them in detail with my next
posting to this Blog.